Use Of Light And Darkness In Macbeth

Stories are outlets for writers to make a world either based in reality or fiction, and some of these stories are made to be acted out in the form of plays. Shakespeare was influential for his time and wrote stories that made the events he described feel realistic. Some of these plays referenced reality with a touch of witchcraft within them. One of these plays, Macbeth, touches on this style by describing the events of the historical Macbeth in Scotland from 1040 to 1057. Within the play, Shakespeare builds on three characters, the witches, who cement themselves as some of the main characters within the play. These witches are used as plot devices to give Macbeth the base idea to go against the king to become one himself. With their use of the supernatural being one of their main traits, being that they are witches and all, it does bring to question. These characters may use their witchcraft as a way to either gain or show more power over the other characters, which can be seen in a lot of their encounters with other characters in the story.

In the play ‘Macbeth’ by William Shakespeare, light and dark imagery is used throughout the story in order to show the difference and symbolism between good and evil. Light represents innocence, truth and purity while darkness is used to represent cruelty, guilt and corruption. Towards the end of the play, Shakespeare correlates the ideas of both lightness and darkness to portray life and death. Ultimately, they represent good and evil. Shakespeare uses these two themes to drive the plot and story forward in order to create conflict, twists and symbolism.

     Macbeth, the shortest and perhaps darkest play by Shakespeare, is a tale of over-riding ambition, human nature, and supernatural meddling. Macbeth is the main character in the play, and although he begins the story a loyal subject and brave hero, the power bestowed on him poisens and corrupts him until he eventually turns evil and seeks more, to his downfall. As the central figure of the play, Macbeth sets in motion a sequence of events that brings about the destruction and eventual rebirth of Scotland, giving the play an essentially dark tone. There are, however, varying degrees of evil, subtly different in texture and context. One way Shakespeare indicates the styles of evil throughout the

Imagine how dull a Shakespearean play would be without the ingenious literary devices and techniques that contribute so much to the fulfillment of its reader or viewer. Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, is a tragedy that combines fact and legend to tell the story of an eleventh century king. Shakespeare uses numerous types of literary techniques to make this tragic play more appealing. Three literary devices that Shakespeare uses to make Macbeth more interesting and effective are irony, symbolism, and imagery.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the connection between light and dark mirroring morality and vision is thoroughly explored through the evolving madness that is Macbeth’s mind. He enters wave after wave of inner turmoil, at times being cast in the dark and other times aware of the cruelty of his acts. The concept of lightness in the play serves to symbolize innocence, purity, and truth while darkness shapes the blossoming corruption and guilt that runs parallel to the superficial action of the play. Shakespeare utilizes the poetical mechanism of contrasting elements to emphasize the characters’ actions that lead to their psychological downfalls as well as to link the idea of lightness to vision and conscious well-being.

The play Macbeth is about a Scottish general who is told by witches that he will one day become King of Scotland. Swayed by the prophecies of the magical witches and pressured by his wife, Macbeth is fueled with ambition and greed which prompts him to kill King Duncan and take his place as ruler. However, Macbeth’s abundance of ambition has a price, as it comes back to haunt him and ultimately leads to his demise. In Macbeth, William Shakespeare utilizes the symbols blood, a dagger, and a ghost to exemplify Macbeth’s guilt and support the theme that ambition produces guilt from unwise and immoral decisions when one is power hungry. To begin with, blood is symbolized by Shakespeare to illustrate Macbeth’s guilt. After killing Duncan, Macbeth

William Shakespeare's Macbeth is an ominous tale that illustrates the danger in violating the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchy of things in God's ordered universe. The Chain ranked all of creation and human society as well. It ranked kings above nobles and nobles above the poor. When Macbeth murdered King Duncan and assumed the throne, the Chain was violated and chaos resulted. The atmosphere of the play symbolized this resulting turmoil. Specifically, light and darkness were used to exemplify the unnatural chaos and ominous tone of the work. The role of light and the role of darkness relates to the chaos resulting from the violation of the Great Chain of Being.

In The Tragedy of Macbeth William Shakespeare uses the motifs of blood and darkness to dramatize the Macbeths’ loss of humanity as they choose dominance and their own ambitions over light and a prosperous life.

In the Shakespearean play, Macbeth, symbolism plays a key role by foreshadowing the deceit among the characters. Symbolism represents another idea or quality, Shakespeare strategically and effectively places symbols in nature, the weather, and even blood. Darkness connects to the characters motives as well as symbolizes that something very bad is going to happen very soon. An example of the symbol of darkness happens in the very first act.

In William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth evil is conveyed in many ways through characters, themes and settings. Many themes are explored in detail contributing hugely to the sense of evil with characters being used along with these themes to create evil within the characters. These themes and characters are shown in different settings at different times consequently affecting the mood and atmosphere of the play.

Is the image ‘Darkness’ really a sign of Macbeth losing his mind? Shakespeare employs the Darkness image to show how Macbeth has unknowingly tweaked his mindset about what good and bad decisions are, ultimately revealing how arrogance leads to bad decisions, and those bad decisions come with consequences that will punish you. In Macbeth, the image ‘Darkness’ is used to show how the darkness makes Macbeth become evil and Macbeth’s transformation. In act one, Lady Macbeth got the message that the king is coming over for the dinner party, Lady Macbeth thinks to herself, “Bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue. Look like th’ innocent flower, But be the serpent under ‘t.” (1.5.75-77).

The themes of ambition, insecurity and the power of the ego are prevalent not just in current society, but also in Scotland during the period in which this play is set. Macbeth’s own interpretation of these emotions, provoked since the first encounter with the witches, is what makes him commit ruthless and immoral actions. The supernatural provokes

     William Shakespeare in the tragedy Macbeth very skillfully uses imagery to support other aspects of the drama, especially the theme. In this essay let us examine the imagery, including literary critical comment.

In Scene 5, Lady Macbeth uses a lot of darkness imagery in her soliloquies. She calls upon the ‘thick night’ to be a pall in the ‘dunnest smoke of hell’ and a woman like her who has no scruples admits to the face that the deed is so gruesome that it is best performed under the ‘blanket of dark’. She asks Macbeth as to when the king proposes to leave Inverness and when her husband replies that he has come for the night only she complacently asserts that ‘O never/shall sun that morrow see’ implying that overnight they will dispose him off. It should be noted that Duncan is murdered at night.

Abstracting a theme from a play is not identical to establishing a point as fact. In Macbeth, as in other Shakespearean plays, we find that appearances are one thing, reality another. A more specific configuration of the main theme (there are also minor themes) is that only a deluded person thinks that playing with evil can leave him or her unchanged and that humanity, yielding to evil, is led to destruction.